This weblog was created to act as a platform for the voice of secular pro-democracy activists in and outside Iran who are struggling against the religious dictatorship of the Islamic clerics in Iran.
My favourite quote:
"Evil only prevails when the good stay silent"

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Herasat is a repressive body in every Iranian university and government work place which spies and reports on students and government employees and carries out such repressive acts as shown in the film footages above.

Meanwhile, the chief of these thugs, Ayatollah Messbah Yazdi is invited to the Waterloo university by the Mennonites:

Thursday, May 24, 2007

In those days there was no internet and the best way of obtaining upto date news was by constantly tuning the short wave radio from one station to another. Everyone knew the importance of what was at stake and how it would be a turning point in repelling the Ba'athist aggressors. Iran's once feared professional army was emasculated and a large number of our best air force officers had been executed after the Shahrokhi air base uprising. So much depended on the courage of what was left of the military, the revolutionary guards, the volunteers and the local people of Khorramshahr. It was a test of courage against armour. It was a moment where our differences were forgotten. The only thing that mattered was defeating Saddam's forces.

BBC 'analysts' were skeptic of a quick conclusion, saying making the masses of Iraqi forces to retreat from the city would be a tough nut to crack or something like that.

Finally the state radio announcement that we had all been waiting for, came. "Dear listeners! Dear listeners! Please pay attention!" Our hearts stopped beating for a second, was it good news or bad? "...Khorramshahr, the city of blood - Khoonin Shahr - has been liberated."

The joy from hearing the news is impossible to put down in words. Still we wanted other sources to confirm the news. The tuning knob was turned back and forward so many times that it just came off in my hand and we were left with the annoying crackling white noise you hear in between stations.

I am not sure if I read in the papers over the next few days or how, but I remember how I laughed my head off at Saddam's propaganda machine's claims that the Iraqi forces had taken part in an 'organised retreat, having established all their military objectives!' Yeah Right Mr. Gobels!

This was the best moment to make Saddam concede. He was on his knees and willing to pay Iran compensation. Sadly those who profited from the continuation of the war or had some illusions of expanding the Islamic Republic to Iraq, had the upper hand. A golden opportunity to end the war as victors was denied to our nation and 8 years later, after so many Iranians were maimed and martyred, the poison chalice had to be drunk.

Today all of us Iranians should remember those who fell in the epic battle for liberation of Khorramshahr. Today we should honour those who still suffer the injuries of the eight year war and make sure they are not forgotten.

Monday, May 21, 2007

These days I am normally back in Amsterdam on Sunday nights, but yesterday I had the rare opportunity of watching the seven a side CIS football team. My friend Kamran and I make a small contribution by sponsoring the team in the London Power League tournament.

These boys have all suffered in one way or another from the Islamic Republic, yet they have shunned the established Iranian political groups and 'parties' who have either done nothing but talk in the last 28 years or have lost the trust of the Iranian people.

This is why I avoid all these 'opposition' conferences and gatherings. To me they are discredited one man entities who equate to zero. If you put lots of zeros together in a room, you still get a zero. I can sum up the result of these Congresses and Conferences in one sentence:"They came, they sat, they talked and then went away"Money that can be better spent in attracting and involving the huge silent majority of people who loathe the Islamic dictatorship in Iran and want to do something about it, is instead spent on hotel and travel tickets of spent personalities whose result of three decades of 'activism' amounts to naught.

I rather be amongst these talented and determined youngsters than the old wind bags of the Iranian exiled opposition who are only capable of writing an article or holding an interview on VOA, saying the same old things again and again.

A lot of credit must go to Saman, who in my absence from London has formed the CIS team and worked diligently in all the organisation needed. Lets hope we make Iranians proud by performing well but most important of all by displaying good sportsmanship throughout the league matches.

Once again the true brutal and sadistic face of Islamic Republic has been captured on camera.

Islamic Republic apologists and lobbyists will have to put their ugly heads together and think of more pathetic excuses on how they can window dress the religious dictatorship in Iran as an acceptable form of government for the Iranian people.

Lets hunt down the Islamic Republic apologists, who enjoy and relish the privileges of living a secular life in the West, but promote the ruling theocracy in Iran, and FORCE them to wear a sack on their head. Lets see how they like it.

Friday, May 18, 2007

The Islamic regime claims these are thugs and criminal elements. Even if they are criminals, beating and humiliating human beings in public in such a way without the due process of a trial shows the true nature of IR.

If the Western media had any sense it would give the same exposure to these pictures that it gave to pictures from Guantanamo and Abu-Ghoraib:

Thursday, May 17, 2007

I don't know if I am correct in interpreting these photographs taken by Haleh Pahlavan. But to me the picture below suggests that even the male police has had enough of the abusive foul language by the Islamic policewoman and is telling her to shut up, while the expression in the face of the Iranian girl who is being harassed, suggests that she is not taking the abuse lying down either.

And in the one below, it seems the young man is having a go at the Islamic policewoman who is harassing the girls standing on the pavement.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

I don't envy the Islamic regime's apologists and lobbyists, for although they have a lot of funds at their disposal, from Iranian government or the oil giants, they have a tall order. Islamic Republic is a religious dictatorship, where the rights of a citizen are determined by their religion or more accurately by their adherence to the state's interpretation of Shiite theology. Pure and simple, Islamic Republic is evil and wrong.

So how do these lobbyists and apologists cope with such a difficult task of window dressing the Islamic Republic? First of all they rely on the 'useful idiots' in the West. The same ones who tried to glamorise the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao. 'Useful idiots' are very active, and they seem to have a lot of time for activism. They are also experts in getting grants and funding. The army of 'useful idiots' as well as the funds at their disposal is their strength.

The Achilles heel of the IR apologists and lobbyists is their bankrupt arguments. One really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with a viable argument to defend the Islamic Republic. One of the pivotal arguments they have been posing is that while Iran is under external threat, the human rights abuses and all the other wrongs in the Islamic Republic should not be highlighted and we should all concentrate on fighting this external threat first and foremost. See CASMII's protest at a mild petition put up by Znet that mildly criticised the human rights abuses in Iran.

Now lets examine one of CASMII's leading members, Abbas Edalat. He was educated in the US after having received a scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation, i.e. from the Shah's regime. Yet this receiver of the scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation did not hesitate to campaign against the Shah's regime as a student. Under the Shah, Iran was definitely under the external threat from two of its immediate neighbours, the Soviet Union and Iraq. The Russian ambitions to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf go back to Peter the Great's will and after the second World War, the Soviets tried to break up Iran by supporting and promoting a separatist movement in Azerbijan, North West Iran.

After their failure in Azerbijan, the Soviets continued their desires to turn Iran into a Russian satellite by supporting and funding the puppet pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and other insurgencies.Programs by the Peyk Radio of the Tudeh Party, broadcast from Eastern Europe, continued to disseminate Soviet propaganda against the Shah’s regime.

Iraq's ambition on breaking away Khuzestan province from Iran was aided by Egypt's other Pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who referred to Iranian Khuzestan as Arabestan. Iraq also disputed the river borders of Arvand-rood, and on several occasions Saddam's forces attacked Iranian border posts only to be pushed back by the well organised Iranian army at the time.

So Iran was definitely under external threat at the time, yet students like Abbas Edalat studying abroad on a government grant, never considered that they should stop their activities against the Shah to combat the external threats. In fact many of them directly collaborated with the governments that posed that very external threat.

These students would be educated in US and Western European countries but for some peculiar reason then wanted an Albanian, Chinese, Algerian or some other tin-pot dictatorship styles for Iran! Patriotism to them was either a dirty word and just was not found in their vocabulary.

But all of a sudden now, their 'patriotism' is preventing them from criticising the Islamic Republic. The fact is that the Islamic Republic feels threatened even by its own shadow, and will always create an 'external threat' and an 'external enemy'. Islamic Republic craves and lives on crisis as a way of extending its shelf life.

After 28 years however, most Iranian people are seeing through these gimmicks and bluffs of the clerical state. They rightly demand their rights to a decent standard of living, their right to have a say in how they are governed, and their right to personal freedoms. I can not imagine how for example, Iranian teachers, who only demand the enactment of the Islamic Assembly bill for public workers, and nothing more, can be regarded as colluding with the 'external threat'?!Nor indeed how Iranian women who want justice in state gender laws, nor the workers who demand their unpaid wages, nor any other stream of the Iranian pro-democracy movement, in any way are colluding with any external threats.

The argument to suppress home grown dissent because of external threats has been used by just about all dictatorships. If such an argument had any shred of consistency, Israel should be the most brutal dictatorship against its own citizens because of all the external threats it faces. Yet even during the missile attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah, some Israeli citizens felt free enough to demonstrate against the war and criticise their government. Imagine what would have happened if a group of Iranians protested in Iran, during the war with Iraq, and demanded that the Islamic Republic accepted the peace treaty that was on offer after the Iraqi aggressors had retreated from our borders.

Demanding justice at home not only does not promote external threats, but a perception of being able to campaign freely for justice and bring one's government to accountability actually strengthens one's resolve to defend the system against external threats.

The 'external threat' argument is so old, repetitive, bankrupt and baseless that only 'useful idiots' will be convinced by it. Any sane person can realise that the motivation for such arguments is more suspect than it appears on the surface and there is another agenda behind it.

More Iranian teachers were beaten up outside the Islamic Assembly in Tehran yesterday. Many were prevented from joining the rally by road blocks and fear of previous brutal crackdowns, but despite the smaller numbers yesterday, there was no reduction in the brutality of the Islamic Republic security forces.

Some of the teachers were huddled into unmarked cars and taken away to undisclosed locations. One teacher suffered a stroke and another was unable to talk after having been so savagely beaten up.

Amongst the arrested was Sorraya Darabi, whose husband Mohammad Khaksari, editor of a Teacher publication, is still in prison. There are reports that their eldest son, Sajjad has also now been arrested.Of course the Islamic Republic apologists and lobbyists, the current champions of the British academic institutions and the Champagne Socialists, admonish all Iranian dissidents and those who report on such crackdowns. In their view while their beloved Islamic Republic is under "external threat", there should be no dissent or reporting of dissent.

See CASMII's protest at Znet's mild criticism of the Islamic Republic on 18th May, 2006:“At a time that Washington's plans to attack Iran are according to Seymour Hersh in their operational phase, it is regrettable that your petition caves into US propaganda by devoting more space in its text to condemnation of the Iranian regime, which is to a large extent based on fallacies, inaccuracies and exaggerations, than to opposing the US warmongers. As citizens or residents of western countries, our essential duty is to oppose the aggressive and imperial policies of our own elected governments which we face and can impact rather than present a misleading and condescending picture of the internal situation in Iran and promote our version of "democracy" for a country with a different culture than ours. In our view, the petition as it stands does not work in favor of the freedom loving people of Iran, nor does it justify the good intentions of the thoughtful people behind it. Rather than joining the bias Western media and condemning Iran for human rights violations at a time when there are explicit plans in place to attack Iran, we feel that it is our obligation to expose the double standards of the Western media and the leaders. The war crimes and the gross violations of human rights committed by the coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the human rights issues in Israel, and the Arab client states of the United Sates, as well as the violations of the U.S. Constitution, international renditions, Guantanamo Bay, and torture, will remain our main area of public focus.” CASMII, June 11, 2006

or an email I recently received from an Islamic Republic apologist, Shirin Saedi (ss725@cam.ac.uk ), from Cambridge Universty and a member of the CASMII editorial, who desperately tried to justify the crimes of Islamic Republic :"....any country under threat passes extraordinairy laws to bypass democratic institutions."

Monday, May 07, 2007

Baseej pressure groups have called for the 70 year old Nooredin Zarrin-kelk , the father of animation in Iran, to be executed.

Zarrin-kelk is accused of having ridiculed a female student's chador, the head to toe Islamic cover, after she drew an angel with no hair. The incident led to organised protests by state backed fundamentalist Baseej students, who once again exploited the situation in favour of their recent demand for a second "cultural revolution".

Baseej affiliated websites however, have now gone one step further and demanded nothing short of the execution of the 70 year old lecturer.One website even implicitly threatened Zarrin-kelk's family members by boasting to have obtained their personal telephone numbers and addresses.British universities however will probably once again ignore the plight of their colleague in Iran, and continue to host Islamic Republic's "fake dissidents" and apologists.

An incident in the classroom involving a part-time instructor, has led to the expulsion of the instructor from the Tehran university's Arts Faculty and more rowdy protests to "clean up" the universities by Baseej students. Kamangir describes the incident in detail and has pictures of the protests and placards.

It is said the instructor may be the seventy year old Nouredin Zarrinkelk, the father of animation in Iran.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

After the May Day protests in Tehran yesterday, Mansoor Ossanlou, the Bus Drivers Union leader was approached by three plain clothes agents in the Haft-Tir Metro station, who tried to kidnap him. Ossanlou's companions however alerted the public to what was going on and consequently the plot to kidnap Ossanlou was foiled with the help from the public.

Ossanlou and his companions immediately lodged a complaint in the courts, but the court official, Dargahi, responded by saying "I am against your syndicate and you should join the official Islamic unions", and rejected their complaint.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Right now there is an all out assault on Iranian students at AmirKabir university. ArashKamangirand 30Tboy.blogspot have written good detailed reports on how a fake publication deemed to be "insulting" is used as a pretext to attack the students in Iran's most vociferous university against the clerical rule.

One would expect the British universities and students to react in solidarity with their Iranian colleagues to help prevent more Iranian students from being beaten up, sent to prison and banned from their education. Instead, what are the British universities doing? Once again they have given a platform to a lackey of the Islamic Republic to promote a religious Apartheid.

When I was a student, it was rightly inconceivable for a British university to have invited a promoter of Apartheid in South Africa to bolster the image of that regime, so I am lost for words as to why the Islamic Republic continues to receive such opportunities from the British academics??

What is it that these dimwit lecturers, student societies and deans do not understand? How much lower can the British universities sink to?

On 2nd of May, at 6 pm, Trinity College, Cambridge is hosting one of the vilest promoters of the Islamic Republic, Abbas Edalat, to speak on Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

About Me

Follow Me on Twitter @potkazar
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Last time I was in Iran, was during the Islamic "cultural revolution". I hated what was taking place in front of my eyes.
Illiterate gangs of thugs attacking students and academics and telling them how a university must be run! Book stalls being attacked, with books torn up and burned.
I knew then that I had to do something to get rid of this scourge of clerics who had seized power in Iran.
My main objective in life is to help establish a secular democracy in Iran.
I believe the best way forward for Iran to be based on four pillars of Democracy, Secularism, Nationalism and Meritocracy.
Most countries that have adopted these principles have been prosperous, why shouldn't our people be one of them?